"Disconnecting Something From Anything": Fetishized Objects, Alienated Subjects, and Literary Modernism

This dissertation explores modernist attitudes toward the commodity and the process of commodification under late capitalism. Some modernists, notably those commonly referred to as the "men of 1914," lament a reversal of the presumed proper relationship between subject and object, in which people become passive as a result of the mechanical routines of the workplace, and objects gain perverse independence from their human creators. My dissertation suggests that there is a feminist alternative to this familiar, hegemonic modernist critique in the work of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. For Stein, Barnes, and Woolf, the problem with commodification is not passive subjects and animated objects, but, to the contrary, domineering subjects and a fungible object world. Stein, Barnes, and Woolf seek not to reclaim humanitys world-creating powers, but to re-enchant the world of things and discover modes of ethical passivity that enable a more receptive, hospitable relationship to alterity.

In articulating this alternative critique, I distinguish my position from two strains of modernist scholarship, one that acknowledges only one critique of commodification—that of the "men of 1914"—and a wave of scholarship that considers itself as, in the words of Kathryn Simpson, "exploding the myth [...] of modernist writers' and artists' absolute disinterest, detachment and contempt for popular and consumer culture" (1). While I align myself with the latter contingent, I differentiate my position through a consideration of the ways in which certain modernists reformulate a critique of the commodity in less absolutist and naïve terms. I argue that Stein, Barnes, and Woolf advance immanent critiques that do not presume to stand outside the commodity industry but draw power from certain tensions within commodification. Specifically, their critique is animated by a paradox: by exaggerating the alienation and fetishism characteristic of commodification, they hope to combat the commodity's reifying logic.